The surprisingly simple details are below, but I can attest this process works (it’s the same one we use to improve the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum).
Step 1: Ask Your Students How They Feel
At the end of each lesson or exercise, simply ask your students how they felt about it.
From our experience, surveying students about their feelings provides more actionable feedback than a question like “On a scale from 1 to 5 how would you rate…?”.
Here are the specific questions we students ask after every ExEC exercise:
We get better results by asking emotionally-based questions because:
It’s easier for students to check boxes indicating their feelings than it is for them to score an exercise on an arbitrary number scale.
We care as much about the “why” behind their rating as we do about the rating itself. From our experience, students provide more in-depth answers to why they have a feeling than why they gave something a numeric rating.
Step 2: Analyze the Data
Once your data comes back, patterns will emerge.
For example, this data from Fall 2021 shows how ExEC students felt after completing their first exercise:
While the majority of students felt excited and confident about the assignment, 18% of them felt confused, which provided an opportunity for improvement.
After reading why those students felt confused, we hypothesized adding a video that showed students how to turn their assignments in might reduce their confusion.
Step 3: Implement Improvements
In our case we created a video demonstrating how to submit ExEC assignments on each of the major LMSs (e.g. Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, D2L).
In your case, you’ll implement solutions informed by your students’ surveys. After that, you can simply ask your students for their feedback again so you can . . .
Step 4: Compare the Before Data
In our case, the impact of the new video was immediate. By Spring of 2022 . . .
We saw student confusion cut in half, while excitement and confidence continued to rise.
The best part is, you can use these four steps to improve just about anything related to your course.
Just ask these two questions:
How did you feel doing this?
Why that feeling?
And you can improve the quality of a specific lesson, a homework assignment, or the course overall.
It’s not because they think the business plans are the best tool for building a business.
We asked the Teaching Entrepreneurship community what tools they teach and many of the instructors we surveyed teach business plans because it’s a course requirement or because they believe it’s “standard practice” outside academia.
Our research appears to contradict the notion that business plans are standard practice as a majority (57%) of instructors outside academia don’t teach business plans at all.
In fact, across the nearly 300 instructors we surveyed, only 8% teach the business plan exclusively.
Compare that to the 88% of instructors who teach one of the “canvases” (e.g. Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and/or Value Proposition Canvas) and it’s clear business plans are no longer the de facto standard.
Why Do Teachers Love the Business Plan?
The few respondents teaching only the business plan cited many reasons for preferring this tool. The most commons reasons are:
It is a comprehensive tool
It is necessary for some funding sources like bank loans
It is required by standards in the respondent’s particular context
But the vast majority of teachers don’t feel that way – across all teacher populations we surveyed (K-12 and higher ed, academic and non-academic, from the US and abroad), only 8% teach only the business plan.
For instructors and course coordinators who still teach the business plan:
Requirements that business plans be taught because they are seen as a standard entrepreneurial practice should be reconsidered.
While some instructors see benefits in teaching business plans, and they may be important to teach in some circumstances, they are taught by a minority of instructors both inside and outside academia and should no longer be considered the de facto standard for describing businesses.
What Entrepreneurship Tools Do Teachers Use?
“Canvases” (Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and/or Value Proposition Canvas) have replaced the business plan as the most popular teaching tool.
As we mentioned earlier, 88% of instructors we surveyed teach with some version of a Canvas, and 50% teach the Business Model Canvas.
Why Do Teachers Love the Canvas?
Our respondents cited many reasons for preferring the Business Model Canvas. The most common reasons are:
It is simple and user friendly. Specifically, some teachers noted the BMC is a way to engage non-business students that is not intimidating.
It forces students to focus on customer development and experimentation as they pursue product-market fit.
It is the dominant tool used in “the real world.”
Because of the dominance of the BMC in entrepreneurship education, we engaged Dr. Alexander Osterwalder in a series of posts to share how he teaches this tool.
How Do The Entrepreneurship Tools You Use Compare To Your Peers?
Nearly 80% of K-12 teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.
Nearly 90% of academic teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.
Nearly 90% of US-based teachers reported using a canvas tool to teach entrepreneurship, while almost 50% reported using a business plan.
Other Popular Entrepreneurship Education Tools
AI Tools
To see the full list of additional teaching tools, please enter your email below.
It is not surprising many respondents mentioned AI as a favorite tool. In previous posts, we explored some of the challenges of using AI in academia, and also some benefits. For instance, in a lesson plan we developed, students use ChatGPT as a cofounder and develop a business model and an MVP to test that business model.
Stay tuned for an exciting announcement about our upcoming
Design Thinking
Many respondents mentioned design thinking as a favorite tool. Using this process, students create ideas that are exciting to customers and that they want to pay for because the product actually solves their real problems.
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a technique for evaluating and making choices about an organization, products/services, or specific projects. Founders and small business owners use it to make smart, informed business decisions because it aids in understanding a company’s position within their market or industry and knowing how and where it can grow.
Mindmapping
A mind map is a graphic representation of thoughts, ideas, concepts and notes. This tool allows your students to visually organize information and see relationships among parts of the whole.
Because mind maps offer a visual means to identify connections, it is an excellent tool for idea brainstorming and for competitive analysis. For instance, students can identify similar products/services and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses relative to the student’s product/service.
If you are interested in collaborating on research with this data, please email [email protected] and let us know!
In future posts we will share more about our upcoming TeachingEntrepreneurship.org Summer Summit and about tools and methods to increase student engagement.
Subscribe here to get info delivered in your inbox.
Last week we discussed the challenges of AI in academia. This week, we’re exploring the benefits of it, with a new lesson plan! In this exercise, your students will explore…
Who is a better cofounder: a human, or ChatGPT?
In this lesson you’ll simultaneously:
Demonstrate some of the amazing capabilities of ChatGPT to your students
You’ll also give them an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of the business model validation process
This is a powerful exercise to wrap up your term, in particular as a final project or exam.
Watch the video below for a demo:
My ChatGPT Cofounder Demo
Get the “My ChatGPT Cofounder” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “My ChatGPT Cofounder” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
Many of us are concerned about the impact of ChatGPT and other AI tools on academic integrity.
How are we going to combat ChatGPT and other AI tools in our classrooms?
The major concern is that more and more students use ChatGPT to complete writing assignments.
Detecting AI writing with enough evidence to act will be a major challenge. As AI tools evolve, so do detection tools, but the detecting tools face higher expectations than those that create AI text, making it doubtful they’ll ever catch up.
Concerns about students shortcutting assignments using AI are very valid, and require creative restructuring of assignments.
While there’s no silver bullet to solve the problems AI-generated text pose, there are tools available to combat ChatGPT use in the classroom.
Let’s look at a few.
Tools to Detect AI Use in Writing Assignments
Here’s a video demonstrating how 3 popular AI detection tools work, and strategies that motivated students can use to defeat them.
GPTZero detects two different factors in AI-generated text:
Perplexity, which measures how likely each word is suggested by AI; a human would be more random.
Burstiness, which compares sentence length and complexity variation and measures the spikes in the perplexity of each sentence. AI-generated text will have a similar degree of perplexity from sentence to sentence, but a human is likely to write with spikes.
Upload text or multiple files at once, and the tool provides a holistic score for how much of the writing is written by AI and also highlights each sentence written by AI, as illustrated below.
Another detection tool is AI Text Classifier, developed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.You must enter at least 1,000 characters for this tool to analyze.
This tool provides a simple suggestion that it considers the text is definitely, possibly, very unlikely, or extremely unlikely AI-generated, but no more depth than that.
Writer AI Content Detector is another AI-generated content detection tool you can use. Paste up to 1,500 characters, and it provides a percentage confidence that the text is human-generated.
As you can see from the video above, these detection tools don’t work very well. A better approach to combat AI in the classroom is reimagining how to structure assignments.
Better Strategies to Avoid AI Plagiarism
The best way to prevent students from relying on AI to produce their assignments requires elements that only humans can fulfill. Here are a few strategies to incorporate those elements:
Have students submit multiple drafts of assignments, with explanations of any changes. This way, you can examine their progress so they can’t simply copy and paste the final assignment
Create plagiarism-resistant assignments by focusing on process rather than product. Scaffold the learning by asking students to explain their thinking through in-class discussion, and then ask them to capture their reasoning in their written reflections.
Grade more in-class assignments, such as short presentations.
Make assignments personal. You can require students to apply the topic to their experience, or have them justify their opinion/outcome by citing personal experiences that informed them.
Using AI for Good in the Classroom
Of course, AI isn’t all bad. In fact, when it comes to teaching entrepreneurship, it can be incredibly powerful. In our next post, we’ll show you the benefits of AI including how to:
Teach your students about AI and
Show them how it can help them quickly come up with new business models and experiments to test those business models
Subscribe here to get the next post delivered in your inbox.
Students’ eyes glaze over when they read the syllabus.
How we can engage students and start teaching them entrepreneurship skills from the moment they walk into our classes?
Jay Markiewicz from Virginia Commonwealth University developed a novel way to start your semester that almost guarantees students will WANT to come back!
Step 1: Problem Definition and Customer Discovery
It’s the first day of class. We want to be anti-boring.
We want to put students in the middle of an engaging experience right away.
And even better, we want the engagement to be instructive.
By asking the question below, the moment is instantly relevant because students are experiencing it in real-time. Students begin by using Post-it notes to answer this question
What are the challenges and concerns students face on day one of a new course?
Students then text their friends that same question, write down their friends’ responses on post-it notes, and mark them as ‘friends said.’
Within minutes, students are practicing customer discovery!
In small teams of 3-4, students take a moment to meet each other and then collaborate by discussing with each other the challenges/concerns they wrote on their post-it notes.
In this step, students start identifying problems, and progress into customer discovery, all within a matter of minutes!
Step 2: Data Analysis
In this step, teams use their post-it notes to group similar answers, ranking their top concerns/challenges.
Each team writes their top 2-3 answers on the board to start a list of all of the concerns/challenges students identified.
You can now engage the class in a discussion on the priority “problems” that students have on day one.
Here are some example answers you may see as the top priority”
“Getting to know each other. Avoiding day one awkwardness.”
“Getting interested in the course. Knowing what I’ll be learning throughout the course.”
In this step, students start analyzing customer discovery data – and you’re not even halfway through your first class!
Step 3: Solution Generation
Now we engage students even deeper, and have a little fun along the way!
They practiced problem definition, customer discovery, and data analysis. The next skill is generating solutions to the problem they just identified.
Ask students to write answers on the post-it notes to the following question:
If you were me, what solutions would you design for these problems?
Students don’t need to text friends this time. Instead, have them form NEW teams of 3-4 students and go through the same steps as above – meet each other, identify the most common solutions, then debrief with answers grouped on the board or wall.
Step 4: Reflection
The last step of this amazing kickoff experience, included in the lesson plan below, are to have students reflect and then to implement solutions.
This is where the lesson goes from good to great as you ask your student to analyze the process they’ve gone through on the first day of class, and the “ah-ha!” moments begin.
Click below to….
Get the Full “What is Your F Problem?” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “What is Your F Problem?” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
With so many tools out there to teach entrepreneurship . . .
Do you want to know which tools other instructors are using, and why?
We’re sending this survey to our community of 12,000+ entrepreneurship educators to discover which teaching tools are the most popular.
And so that all of us benefit, we’ll be sharing the results of the survey with anyone who completes it.
So if you’d like to know which teaching tools are most popular for entrepreneurship education, just answer these very quick questions (~3 min) and we’ll share what we discover with you.
In upcoming posts, we will share lesson plans, slides, videos, and exercises to engage your students.
Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.
Missed Our Recent Articles?
Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:
Pilot Your Purpose. This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
2022 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2022 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
Teaching Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviewing, and the right questions to ask.
Many of our students don’t see themselves mirrored in the entrepreneurship videos, guests, and case studies we use.
What if we created a set of resources and best practices to show ALL our students who they can become?
If you’d like to help create, and have access to, a set of entrepreneurial examples and success stories that highlight under-represented groups, please click the button below.
In upcoming posts, we will share lesson plans, slides, videos, and exercises to engage your students.
Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.
Missed Our Recent Articles?
Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:
Pilot Your Purpose. This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
Teaching Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviewing, and the right questions to ask.
Customer interviews make students anxious because they fear approaching strangers.
It’s our job to build their customer interviewing muscle.
Like the Make Entrepreneurship Relevant Slides, you can use these slides to get your students excited about interviewing customers. If you’d like to lower student anxiety around customer interviews, try this series of experiences:
CRAWL: Learn What To Ask
In your first class on customer interviews, consider using a lesson like the Customer Interviewing Cards to help your students learn:
What questions they should ask
What questions they shouldn’t ask
And, most importantly, why
Once your students have a good sense of what to ask during an interview, they’re ready to . . .
WALK: Interview Classmates
Students should get comfortable interviewing in a low-stakes environment, so have them start by interviewing 2 – 3 of their classmates.
It’s common for students to feel awkward conducting their first interviews. Let them know the awkwardness is normal and that’s why you’re giving them the opportunity to practice. Reassure your students that the more interviews they do, the more comfortable they’ll feel.
Bonus: Having students interview each other means each student gets interviewed as well.
When students get interviewed, they experience how validating it is to have someone listen to their problems.
When students realize that it feels good to be interviewed, they discover they won’t be bothering their interviewees. That insight alone can reduce their anxiety.
Note: The goal of classmate interviews is just to practice interviewing – they shouldn’t be used for real business model validation. Have your students start their classmate interviews off with, “What’s the biggest challenge you have as a student?” and then let the interview flow from there.
Click below to learn how your students can RUN and FLY with their customer interviews!
RUN: Interview Family and Friends
After interviewing a couple of classmates, students are ready to try interviewing friends and family members. This step gives students a safe way to practice interviewing people who, like their customers, will have no idea what a customer interview is.
As homework, ask your students to interview 3 friends or family members for at least 30 minutes each. Their goal is to learn as much as they can about the problems their interviewees have encountered in the last week (i.e., “What have been the biggest challenges that have come up for you over the last week?”).
As with the classmate interviews, the friends and family interviews shouldn’t be related to the product/service the students ultimately want to launch. These are just practice interviews in preparation for . . .
FLY: Interview Customers
Your students are now ready for real customer interviews!
You’ll want to make your students know the right customers to ask for interviews, and how to ask for those interviews, but at this point, your students will have much less anxiety about interviewing customers.
Since we started implementing this progression with our students, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in our students’ interviewing confidence and the quality of their interviews:
“At the beginning, I was really nervous about interviewing but after getting feedback from my friends and family it’s, surprisingly, become my favorite part of the class!”
– ExEC Student
If you’d like any more help teaching customer interviews, including:
In upcoming posts, we will share more slides, videos, and exercises to engage your students.
Subscribe here to be the first to get these in your inbox.
Missed Our Recent Articles?
Whether you are new to our community of entrepreneurship educators, or you’ve been contributing for years, we wanted to give you a list of the posts our community finds most valuable:
Pilot Your Purpose. This exercise helps students discover what they’re passionate about and see how learning entrepreneurial skills can turn that passion into their purpose.
2021 Top Lesson Plans. Here is the list of our 2021 top entrepreneurship exercises and lesson plans based on feedback from our fast-growing community of thousands of entrepreneurship instructors.
“The best class I’ve taken!” We all want a Dead Poets Society moment in our entrepreneurship class. One professor using the Experiential Entrepreneurship Curriculum got hers!
Teaching Customer Interviewing. This card and the online game is a powerful way to teach students the importance of customer interviewing, and the right questions to ask.
Tell students they are hired as a product designer. Their first job out of school is to design an ideal backpack. To help them do this, introduce the series of worksheets laid out in the Backpack Design Challenge lesson plan.
Step 1: The Most Exciting Purchase or Gift
The first worksheet asks students what is the most exciting thing they bought themselves, or were given as a gift recently.
It is really helpful with this exercise for you to share your perspective. At this step, share with them a concrete example of something that really excited you.
Make sure the thing they think of is something specific, and something they were really looking forward to. For example, a birthday present, or a holiday present, or something they’ve been wanting for months that they finally splurged on.
Step 2: Feelings About the Purchase or Gift
Students record the feelings that came up as they made the purchase or received the gift. Give students time to reflect on the emotions they felt.
The point of these two steps is to build the foundation for the design thinking exercise to come.
Our goal is for them to learn a set of skills that helps them design products and services that get their customers as excited about the thing the student is creating as the student was about the purchase or gift.
Now we will teach students to design a backpack that people get super excited about.
Ask students to describe their three “must have” features of their backpack.
Start by describing your three “must haves” and give them a few minutes to write down their three “must haves” that are unique to them.
Step 4: Draw the ideal backpack
The next step is for students to draw their ideal backpack. The point here is not beautiful artwork. The point is to visualize what the backpack with their must-have features looks lke.
Step 6: Ideal backpack reflection
Pair your students up for this step. Each student shares their drawings with their partner.
Each partner will ask lots of questions to dive deep into why their partner wanted certain features and anything else they are curious about.
Next, give students a few minutes to reflect on their partner’s backpack design. They describe what they saw and heard, how they felt about what they saw and heard, etc.
Components of the traditional design process
What should be built (start with product in mind)
How should it work / what should it look like? (functionality)
Do people love it?
Goal: build the best thing
Alternative approach: design thinking introduction
Explain to your students that what they just experienced is the traditional design process. Continue by sharing that this traditional way is not the best way to get customers excited about their product or service.
Ask them whether their partner offered to pre-order when saw other design. Was their partner so excited that they offered to give them real money? The answer will be no.
Explain that in the traditional design process, someone
decides a product they should build
figures out the functionality of their product – what are the nuts and bolts
as a last step, they launch their product and work to figure out whether people love it
For your students to design something that gets people truly excited, they need to understand the design thinking process.
The design thinking process has five steps to create products people get really excited about:
Empathize
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
Talk to your students about the difference between the traditional design process and the design thinking process. In the traditional design approach, they start with thinking about the product they’re going to build.
In the design thinking process, they start with no product in mind. Instead, they start by understanding the customer’s emotional needs. In other words, what motives them on emotional level? This is the empathizing stage
If the goal is to build something people love, empathizing should be the first step in the process not the third step.
Step 7: Design something useful
Now that they are inspired to design something people want, pair students up again. Students interview the partner they previously worked with for 4 minutes each.
It is important here to tell them to forget about the backpack. They are taking a design thinking approach, so they don’t know what the “right” thing to build is. They learn what their partner really loves and why, so they can design something these customers truly want.
The goal of this interview is to find out what’s the hardest part about being a student, how they felt, when they felt that way, and why it’s a problem.
Step 8: Dig deeper
Students then conduct another 4-minute interview with their partner. The difference is, this time they
What feelings arise for their partner when they have the problem they described before
Have they done anything to try and solve that problem
Students next will define the problem their partner mentioned. They will
Synthesize data obtained from partner interview
Answer 3 questions
What goals is their partner trying to achieve?
What did they learn about their partner’s motivation
What is the partner point of view: [partner name] needs a way to [verb] because [problem to solve]
This step outlines for the student a structure for the process of designing a solution that excites their partner.
Step 12: Ideate solutions
We now understand the problem. The goal here is to draw 5 different designs for alternative solutions using the new information they gathered. These designs can be anything. They don’t have to be based in reality – encourage your students to use their imagination.
Step 13: Solicit feedback
In same pairs as before, students share their new solutions with each other and provide feedback. They share with each other what do they like, what don’t they like, and why.
Students will then iterate with their partners to come up with a more ideal solution for the problem based on their partner’s feedback.
This work will likely have nothing to do with backpacks – it will relate to the biggest problems the students experience. It could be about time management, or the dining hall, or parking, or boring classes.
That’s OK – we are working to get them trying to solve real problems for their partner!
Step 14: Reflect on new design
Students now have a new design based on feedback from their partner. Now we want them to reflect on that new design.
In pairs, they will answer two questions about the design their partner developed to solve their problem:
What emotions come up with thinking about partner’s new design, and why?
More excited about partner’s original design or new design, and why?
Step 15: Compare approaches
Now you will recap everything with your students as a class. Tell them they went through two approaches to design:
Traditional design approach – their first design
Design thinking approach – their second design
They now fill out a comparison worksheet for these two approaches. First each student writes down the two different designs their partner create for them. The questions they will answer about these two designs are:
Which design are they most excited about?
Which design is more feasible?
Which design solves their partners’ problem better?
Which design would they choose?
Ask the class as a whole which design method feels more valuable. Specifically, ask them to put up the numbers of fingers representing the number of Xs they have in the Design Thinking row.
You should see an overwhelming number of students put up at least 3 fingers for the design thinking approach.
Highlight for students that this is why we do design thinking:
It is so much more powerful for creating ideas that are exciting to customers and that they want to pay for because the product actually solves their real problems.
Then, summarize for your students that they just completed the full design thinking process:
They empathized – they worked to understand their customer’s problems
They defined the problem – they gathered all the information they learned from their customer & now understand the problem that customer experiences
They then ideated on solutions for that problem – they developed multiple potential solutions for the problem their customer was experiencing
They prototyped products to solve the problem – here they would develop something that a user could actually interact with
Last, they tested their prototype – they solicited feedback from their customer to learn what appealed to them and what did not
The design thinking process is iterative. Students went through it once during this exercise. After testing, they can start again by empathizing with their customer based on their new product.
This approach is powerful because it will help your students work on solving problems that real customers actually experience.
After this exercise is a great place to segway into your syllabus and the topics you will cover and experiences students will have. You can connect this experience to the rest of your course by highlighting they will now be able to:
Understand a wide range of customer needs
Defining the problem
Iterating on a solution to that problem
Designing prototypes of that solution
Testing how customers feel about that solution
Get the “Backpack Design Challenge” Lesson Plan
We’ve created a detailed lesson plan for the “Backpack Design Challenge” exercise to walk you and your students through the process step-by-step.
If you’d like to lower student anxiety around customer interviews, try this series of experiences:
